Religion has its place. But it can never include unreasonable dogma, injustice, abuse of laity or clergy, or any other mounds of medieval crap that churches are buried within.
Indeed, most "Christian" churchs are about control of others, rather than controlling themselves. And Christ has long been absent from many of these institutions.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

On Confronting Sentience

The very nature of language makes discussion of consciousness difficult.

For instance, consider the question, "Are you conscious?"

Break it down: "Are" - form of verb "to be", or the state of existence.

"You" -- the "second person" pronoun that describes your own "I".

"Conscious" -- having this consciousness, this sentience, thisself-awareness that "I" know that I have & experience -- and that, throughthis shared experience, I assume you have, too.

Hopefully you can get the gist of the sentence, because its very structureis an exposition of the nature of our perceptions: that there is me -- "I"-- here, and everything else is "out there".

The zen philosopher Alan Watts was a man before his time, and we would dowell to consider his discussions of consciousness. He considered thisduality of "I" v. "everything else" an illusion of our senses, and that weare all the same (Buddhist-esque concept of) "Big Self", only separated byvarious eddies of decreasing entropy, of which "everyone" includes "their""own" perceptions.

To paraphrase Watts: an apple tree "apples". And so too, the Universe"peoples". In his model, we "people" have in us aspects of the Universe, inthe same way an apple has the seeds to make other apple trees. Further,there are "principles" of the apple tree, from which these "apples" grow.

Again, we are stretching the limits of language when discussing thesematters. An apple, until it falls, is part of an apple tree...but clearly it is notthe apple tree.

In the same way, our Universe is awash with grandiose forces that almostdefy human comprehension -- yet we live in a miniscule eddy of theseswirling forces, which is calm enough for an emergent principle of theUniverse to have emerged: Human beings, our little sub-eddies and pockets of"self" that peer out at the Universe, perceiving in "own" particular ways.We are sensor-pods and brains, connected to the Universe in ways that allowus to _experience_ the Universe, as well as remember these experiences, andcontemplate them.

Now, Alan Watts may have gone out on a limb when he postulated that even thevery rocks of our world are conscious, but "just at a lower level"(paraphrased) -- I'm a bit too sentience-chauvinistic to consider rocks"conscious", even a little bit. Maybe this is a limitation of my ownperceptions, which (say) if regarding rocks at the proper time scale, wouldobserve this elusive emergent property of parts of the Universe --consciousness -- from even the very rocks themselves.

But Watts, in his genius, did give us one of many neat turns of phrase inthese speculations: "...but Watch Out! The rocks will come alive!"

And you know, he's right. We know for a fact that evolution happens, and itstarts with "rocks" of various sorts being formed in stars, from whicheventually we have -- at least here on Earth -- ended up with organiccompounds, for which all scientific evidence indicates has produced humanbeings.

BUT, the face that us human beings are "I's" -- conscious individuals --continues to perplex science. I submit that those who have said thatconsciousness is deeply intertwined with, and an integral part of, ourUniverse, are indeed on the right track. Further, if we admit to ourselvesthat the only way we "know" our neighbor is "conscious" is through ourshared experience of this noumenon, then we would do well to considerother "shared experiences" that seem to be part of our Human Condition.

This is all lead-up to my speculation: "Consciousness" -- that is,"Sentience" -- is only known to us through perceptions of the behaviors ofus packages of brains and sensory equipment that we call "sentient beings".

But it is clear that consciousness is also, at the very least, an emergentproperty of our Universe. I wonder if it doesn't make sense to decouplethis "counsciousness" from our organic packages, instead regarding it aspart of the Universe itself, from which we gain the illusion of being"individuals" through the nature of our own particular organic packages, our"beings"?

_I_ certainly don't know how we would design an experiment to determine ifthat is the case. But if we broaden our notions of science to include"share experiences that are difficult to measure", we might have a start atunderstanding from where this "consciousness" arises...and if any part of itpersists beyond the destruction of our own packages of organic matter.

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But definitely worth exploring, if only to pushthe boundaries of a fundamental essences of our Human Condition: theScience of Mind.